Kristallnacht: The Night of Broken Glass
Known as the “night of broken glass,” Kristallnacht was a sudden and widespread assault on Jewish people and their property in Germany prior to World War 2.
It is also described as a "pogrom", which is a Russian word for an organized massacre or assault on an ethnic or religious group.
It was the Nazi's first widespread use of massive force against their Jewish population. The attack foreshadowed Adolf Hitler’s later attempt to exterminate European Jews through the so-called “Final Solution”.
Kristallnacht took place the night of November 9th and 10th, 1938. The impetus for the attack stemmed from the assassination of a German government official in France.
Herschel Grynspan, a 17-year-old Jewish refugee in Paris, learned that his family had been deported. The Grynszpan family was among 12,000 Polish Jews arrested by the Gestapo, stripped of their property, and herded aboard trains to Poland.
Furious at what the Nazis did to his family, Grynspan purchased a gun and killed Ernst von Rath, a Nazi official at the German embassy in Paris.
After learning of the news, the German government whipped up increased public anti-Semitism. Joseph Goebbels, the public minister of information for the Nazi regime, organized a widespread pogrom against German Jews. A special unit of the Nazi political machine, known as the Sturmabteilung (SA), led groups of civilians across urban centers of Germany, where they sacked more than 500 Jewish homes, synagogues, and storefronts.
When the violence ended, at least 90 Jewish people lay dead and over 30,000 Jewish men were taken into “protective custody” at Nazi labor camps or prisons. During the attack, German men also raped Jewish women and stole any valuables they could find.
The term Kristallnacht itself reveals the rampant anti-Semitism that fueled the violence. So many Jewish synagogues and storefronts had been smashed that Hermann Goering described the shattered glass as so many Jewish “crystals” or “diamonds.”
Two days after the attacks, Goering ordered the enactment of statutes to punish the Jewish community. Jews were disallowed from owning stores, working as independent skilled workers, or attending concerts, movies, or other forms of public entertainment. They were even prohibited from driving cars.
Another harmful aspect of Goering's new laws for Germany's Jewish population was the freeing of German insurance companies from paying for claims resulting from the destruction of Jewish property. As a further insult, Goering ordered that the Jewish community be fined $400 million for the attack. Not surprisingly, over 150,000 Jews left the country in the wake of Kristallnacht.
One of the most far-reaching changes wrought by Kristallnacht was a general shift in Nazi policy toward the Jews. Prior to Kristallnacht, the German government had compelled Jews to emigrate voluntarily to other nations. After Kristallnacht, the German government took a more direct approach that ultimately resulted in the Holocaust—a massive genocide of Jews and other people deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime, both in Germany and in occupied countries.